Running warm and draining battery

[SurfaceGk]

Occasionally (3x) my SP4 runs and drains when not in use. In the morning, I unplug my SP4 and throw it in my bag. When I turn it on to use it, I find that it is warm and the battery has run down to 50-70% (depending on how long it was sitting in my bag). I begin using it and it seems to operate fine and the drain stops and it cools off. Nothing worse than having a drained battery without any use. This only happened 3x since the latest update, but I am losing confidence in the device. Any idea how to prevent this?

Thanks

 

[leeshor]

That issue has not happened to me once. I suspect it's the way I have my SP4 set up. No WiFi in sleep mode and set to hibernate after 20 minutes with the lid closed.

 

[Philtastic]

In my experience, disabling wifi in sleep doesn't help. What might correlate with this happening, however, is putting it into sleep and then removing the power cord which wakes it back up. As far as I've seen, my chances of having a battery drain during sleep increases drastically if I let this happen. Logging back in and putting it to sleep again seems to mitigate this. Removing the power cord first and then putting it to sleep also leads to a much lower chance of this happening.

 

[hughlle]

Can't say if it was recent updates, or at roughly the same time, disabling wifi while in sleep, and I never have a problem any more. Before that it was the case that the machine would be completely drained when I woke up.

 

[Dim-Ize]

I don't think I'm supposed to link to reddit. But, after this latest update (1511) I discovered some strange things happening with sleep and my device was running much hotter than ever before. I always attributed these issues to "someone must be running an app, or doing something wierd, or not updating, etc.". I had not had any issues and I'm rather picky with my software and OCD with keeping clean, optimized devices.

I found a very helpful post there tonight. It pointed me to this link on MS site: Occasional Black Screen.

While that link is related to the Surface Book, I followed those instructions and it corrected a corrupt file that could not be repaired by the sfc /scannow. Frankly, I didn't even know I had a corrupt file.

After following the instructions, downloading the ISO and right clicking on it to mount the file (don't run the setup.exe) I simply typed from a command prompt DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /source:WIM:\Sources\Install.wim:1 /LimitAccess (where D is the drive that I mounted) and let it run.

When it was complete, I reran the sfc /scannow and the issue with sleep and excessive heat is gone.

MS has stated that this issue was created with the latest firmware release and many are experiencing these issues. They will likely fix it in a new release but this will mitigate the problems if you run your sfc /scannow and it cannot repair them from an admin prompt, receiving the error 0x800f081f from the results.

I did not use MS Support online. I just did it myself. Took about 45 minutes (including the download) start to finish. Very happy with the results.

I have a SP4 256 with 8 GB RAM and this resolved my issue.